Why! Am I Determined?

Why do we exist? This is a tireless and seemingly insurmountable question. On the contrary many people answer this question with confidence in many ways. Religion, physics, philosophy, Darwinism all have well established answers and are conveniently accepted by their respective and tidy communities. Today I don’t want to talk about why we exist. All the answers given are often purely utilitarian in nature with little truth or incompleteness. Instead of why we exist, I want to talk about why we persist. That is, why we continue to choose to exist. I have written in depth on my belief in determinism, for the sake of exploration, I will suspend my belief and at this time ignore semantics in the pursuit of exploration. I have always been curious as to what it would be like on a granular level, what it is like, to be someone else. How existence is experienced by the “other”. This weight of sander and experience of being the entranced observer has often supplied a challenge and pressure of understanding. To write an essay that is philosophical and encompassing I feel the expectation is often to write in a tone of positive admiration and appreciation, that is what the audience wants in this context. Truthfully I experience this as a Sisyphean task that has been programmed into my existence. I crave the closure of understanding why we are here, some finality to the infinite. Whatever I endeavor in, I strive for it until I no longer can or till I have reached a point of understanding it completely.  That is, completely, relative to the complexity of that phenomena. My mind suspends its disbelief when I logically understand I likely will not be able to do something, and I chip away. I  am coded for perfectionism and completism. These traits have been fostered in a way of revolt by the online space that currently exists. Fragments and pieces bombarded like psychic shrapnel. Another thing about me to continue with the indecorous style of this essay is that I am a skeptic, this even strains casual discussions. I also believe nothing is purely positive or negative and I fear I have internalized this truth so completely that it allows for justification of accepting instead of mitigating the negatives. This is to say that I am skeptical when someone tells me about something all good or all bad and I often trust something is true in myself when I can see both the negatives and positives of that thing. This chaotic scrutiny is a driving force for needing to know why, Why, WHY. I want to know why I am here, why you believe what you believe, why you believe the reason for why you believe what you believe, and why until that is it. This makes for seemingly scattered yet ultimately effective research methodology. As you have probably already thought, it presents itself with glaring flaws. These have all been seemingly innate or at the least, developed and nurtured into solidity early on. As a result of the core tenets I have more deliberately developed secondary behaviors to augment and continue the search for certainty and completeness. I have become skeptical and dismantling of stories and narratives. Stories to me have always felt like a way of reprieve in the search for closure. So many writers and people in general, X-ray the topic at hand. It’s clean, tidy, and has well defined boundaries. That is because of what it lacks. Creating clear separation and linearity or completeness only truly occurs in the realm of human understanding when we use our ability to negate, ignore, and define. As is likely evident from my carcass of this essay strewn before you today, I do not x-ray my topics. I do not set simple clear boundaries that help communicate an understanding and an image that portrays finality and to some even clarity. I tear into the ideas and consume as much as possible savoring every piece of information believing that every piece is important. Again, obvious pros and cons.  Dear reader aka, my professor, you may think to yourself, didn’t he say that he seeks finality at all cost and now he is telling me that he is incapable of  portraying finality? Yes! You know see my plight, because there is no true finality, there is only change, and gray area. Where a topic truly stops being that topic is almost always semantical. Most formal discussions use definitions as bandages for the limitations of our communications system in seeking pure “truth” . If I were a philosopher, I would make bold confident claims and seek to use my own set of definitions to create such finality. Something like, “we must always be in pursuit of finality though it can never exist the pursuit of truth is an existence of absurdity. We are merely seeking to delay and distract ourselves from our own finality. We seek certainty and closure and in that pursuit, our lives are the bridge to the gap of the only two certainty and finalities we can be sure to experience”. Where we now must go is somewhere new.   I need to adapt. I need to learn to spatchcock the topic at hand. Get ahold of what is real and not simply what has been interpreted, implied, reimagined and extrapolated. The meat of a primary source, dissecting the data and clearly segments each part of the complex topic at hand.

Why.